System Lineup and Testing (SLAT), in general, is the process of bringing a system, which has already been installed at a telecommunications site, into steady-state service capable of carrying traffic. The process also generally applies when expanding an existing, in-service system, by providing a procedure to test new network elements (NEs) before they are added to the system.
For existing optical carrier standards, in-bay testing requires approximately 9 hours to complete and end-to-end testing takes approximately 34 hours. Conventional SLAT processes consist mostly of manual processes. Networks employing high-density cross-connect (HDX) network elements, such as Nortel's OpTera™ Connect HDX, require similar SLAT. However, there is a concern with respect to HDX SLAT in that HDX port density is 96 times that of OC-192. If the same SLAT strategy that has been used for OC-192 were to be used for HDX, the total HDX SLAT time would be in the order of weeks, which is clearly unacceptable to customers. Furthermore, there are many limitations associated with the mostly manual SLAT processes known in the art, many of which allow for errors to be introduced or omissions to be made in the SLAT process. Therefore, a different network element SLAT strategy is required, particularly for use with high-density network elements.